Both Both: Sigo and Bellamy

Tomorrow!!! I'm reading with my good friend Cedar Sigo in John Sakkis' Both Both series.

Oct. 25TH 7PM
At John's place in San Francisco's lower Haight
415 Pierce St. #3 (Between Oak and Fell)

Please BYOB...

Cedar Sigo is 30 years old and moved to San Francisco in 1999. His books include Goodnight Nurse, Thankyou Letters, two editions of Selected Writings, Deathrace V.S.O.P (with Micah Ballard & Will Yackulic) Stranger in Town, and most recently Expensive Magic. He is currently editing a small collection of essays on poetry—Can 2.

When you're there, also check out new artworks by David Petrelli.

David Petrelli is an artist living in San Francisco. A transplant from the East Coast, having lived in Boston, Providence, NYC and Philadelphia, he moved west 3 years ago to pursue his interest in the culture and history of the Bay Area. He has studied at the Museum School of Fine Arts, Boston and the San Francisco Art Institute, as well as having graduated from the Natural Gourmet School of Cookery in New York City. His artistic pursuits include painting, writing, graffiti, printmaking, found objects sound art and ayurvedic cooking.

Jack Spicer’s Bedside Reading

At Kasey Mohammad's urging, here's the list of the Spicer detective and sci fi novels. This list is arranged a bit differently than the version I emailed to some of you—it's been alphabetized and slightly annotated. This will be helpful for those of you who want to replicate the entire box—and more than one person has suggested to me they in fact plan to do that. Kevin already bought me the exact same edition of the Perry Mason novel The Case of the Mythical Monkeys. We are a bunch of geeks, aren't we.

Thanks to Tony Power, of the Special Collections Department of Simon Fraser University, for giving us permission to catalogue these titles.

Asterisks in the list below, prepared by me and Kevin in August 2008, denote books we’re suspicious about. The list is supposed to be of books in Jack Spicer’s possession when he died in August 1965, but the books we’ve starred have publication dates of later years. (Seven of these, as you’ll see, and one more that we're sort of suspicious about, Sontag’s The Benefactor, which though it does show a publication date of 1963, has the look of a paperback from the post-1965 era—and in any case sticks out like a sore thumb from the majority of books on the list, largely private eye novels, classical Golden Age detection, sci-fi, and a couple of beefcake pulp titles with a strong gay interest like Viereck’s Men into Beasts.)


1. Analog, September 1960

2. Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity
Lancer 74-818 (1963)

3. E.C. Bentley, Trent’s Last Case
Ballantine Books F690 (1958)

4. R. Vernon Beste, The Moonbeams
Lancer 72-733 (1964)

5. Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man
Signet S1593 (1959)

6. James Blish, A Case of Conscience
Ballantine Books 256 (1958)

7. *****Pierre Boulle, Monkey Planet
Penguin 2401 (1966)

8. Fredric Brown, The Dead Ringer
Bantam 1216 (1954)
From Ted Fraser’s Book Bin, Vancouver

9. Fredric Brown, The Fabulous Clipjoint
Bantam 1566 (1957)

10. Fredric Brown, The Late Lamented
Bantam Mysery 2030 (1960)

11. Fredric Brown, The Screaming Mimi
Bantam Mystery 1312 (1955)
From Ted Fraser’s Book Bin, Vancouver

12. John Brunner, The Whole Man
Ballantine Books U2219 (1964)

13. Eugene Burdick, The 480
Dell 2684 (March 1965)

14. Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Moon Maid
Ace F-157 (n.d.)

15. James M. Cain, Love’s Lovely Counterfeit
Signet 1445 (1957)


16. Bruce Cameron, The Case Against Colonel Sutton "A nerve shattering novel of a man fighting a slur against his manhood—so vile—it could only be discussed in whispers."
Paperback Library 54-266 (1961)

17. John Dickson Carr, Death Turns the Tables
Berkley Medallion F929 (1964)

18. Raymond Chandler, The High Window
Pocket Books 50118 (March, 1965)

19. Raymond Chandler, Trouble is My Business
Pocket Books 50127 (May, 1965)

20. Leslie Charteris, Alias The Saint
Fiction Publishing Company K110 (1931)

21. Leslie Charteris, Enter the Saint
Fiction Publishing Company, K107 (1931)

22. Leslie Charteris, The Saint Sees It Through
Fiction Publishing Company K102 (1946)

23. Leslie Charteris, The Saint Steps In
Fiction Publishing Company K101 (1943)

24. Gordon Childe, What Happened in History
Pelican P6 (1946)

25. Agatha Christie, After the Funeral
Fontana Books 110 (1961)

26. Agatha Christie, Murder After Hours
Dell D390 (1960)

27. Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Pocket Books 45009 (1964)

28. Manning Coles, A Toast to Tomorrow
Berkley Medallion F873 (1964)

29. Carter Dickson, The Unicorn Murders
Berkley Medallion F948 (1964)

30. *****Gordon R. Dickson, Soldier, Ask Not
Dell 8090 (1967)

31. Stanley Ellin, The Eighth Circle
Dell 2228 (1964)

32. *****Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act
Signet Q 3022 (1966)

33. A.A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner), Pass the Gravy
Pocket Book 45001 (1964)

34. Fate Magazine, September 1962

35. Ruth Fenisong, But Not Forgotten/The Schemers (double novel book)
Ace G508 (1960)

36. Constantine Fitzgibbon, When the Kissing Had to Stop
Bantam F2255 (1961)

37. Ian Fleming, Goldfinger
Signet D2052 (1962)

38. Lucy Freeman, Catch Me Before I Kill More
Pocket Books C221 (1956)

39. Galaxy, June 1963

40. Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Mythical Monkeys
Pocket Books 45011 (5th printing, 1964)

41. William Campbell Gault, Vein of Violence
Award Books K A125F (February, 1965)

42. Donald Hamilton, The Shadowers
Gold Medal K1386 (1964)

43. Harry Harrison, Bill the Galactic Hero
Berkley Medallion F1186 (1965)

44. Matthew Head, The Smell of Money
Avon G1229 (1943)

45. Matthew Head, The Accomplice
Avon G1252 (1947)

46. ****Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Avon V2191 (1967)

47. Chester Himes, The Crazy Kill
Avon T-357 (1959)
From Ted Fraser’s Book Bin, Vancouver

48. Fred Hoyle, The Black Cloud
Signet, D2202 (1962)

49. Alan Hunter, Gently Floating
Berkley Medallion F1001 (1964)

50. *****Harry Kemelman, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late
Fawcett D863 (Nov. 1965)

51. Samuel A. Krasney, Homicide West
Pocket Books 6140 (1962)

52. Henry Kuttner, Ahead of Time
Ballantine Books 30 (1953)
From Ted Fraser’s Book Bin, Vancouver
Note: Spicer owned two editions, listed separately.

53. Henry Kuttner, Ahead of Time
Four Square 371 (1964)
Note: Spicer owned two editions, listed separately.

54. Henry Kuttner, Murder of a Mistress
Permabooks M 4082 (1958)
From Ted Fraser’s Book Bin, Vancouver

55. Henry Kuttner, Mutant
Ballantine Books F724 (1953)

56. Ed Lacy, The Men From the Bus
Pocket Books 1152 (1957)

57. Fritz Leiber, The Mind Spider and Other Stories/
The Big Time (double novel book)
Ace D-491 (1961)

58. Fritz Leiber, Jr., Night’s Black Agents
Ballantine 508K (1961)

59. Robert Lowry, This is My Night
Popular Library 676 (1955)

60. H.P. Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
Belmont 92-617 (February 1965)

61. Ross Macdonald, The Chill
Bantam F2913 (March, 1965)

62. Ross Macdonald, The Doomsters
Bantam A2024 (1958)
From Ted Fraser’s Book Bin, Vancouver

63. Ross Macdonald, Find a Victim
Bantam A2388 (1962)

64. John Ross Macdonald, Marked for Murder [The Ivory Grin]
Pocket Book 6030 (1960)
From Ted Fraser’s Book Bin, Vancouver

65. John Ross Macdonald, Meet Me at the Morgue
Pocket Book 1020 (1954)
From Ted Fraser’s Book Bin, Vancouver

66. John Macdonald, The Moving Target
Pocket Book 680 (1950)
From Ted Fraser’s Book Bin, Vancouver

67. Ross Macdonald, The Three Roads
Bantam A2069 (1960)

68. Ngaio Marsh, Death of a Fool
Avon T254 (1956)

69. Ed McBain, Death of a Nurse
Pocket Books M 4306 (1964)

70. Ed McBain, Killer’s Choice
Pocket Book M4267 (1962)

71. Judith Merril, ed., 9th Annual Edition: The Year’s Best S-F
Dell 9775 (May, 1965)

72. *****Miller & Rhodes, Only You, Dick Daring
Bantam S3045 (Oct. 1965)


73. Burgo Partridge, A History of Orgies
Avon G1062 (1960)

74. Frederick Pohl, ed., The Best Science Fiction from If Magazine, No. 1

75. Margaret Scherf, Never Turn Your Back
Popular Library SP316 (1959)

76. *****Stephen Schneck, The Nightclerk
Grove 6376 (1966)

77. Clifford D. Simak, Time and Again
Ace Book F-239 (1951)

78. Susan Sontag, The Benefactor
Avon V2114 (1963)

79. Rex Stout, The Mother Hunt
Bantam F2828 (1964)

80. Rex Stout, Three Men Out
Bantam F2801 (1964)

81. Veeck—As in Wreck: The Autobiography of Bill Veeck with Ed Linn
Bantam S2537 (1963)

82. George Sylvester Viereck, Men into Beasts
Gold Medal Book 552 (1956)

Plus one pack of playing cards (Mohawk)

Thank You Kevin Killian

Just wanted to send out an official thank you to Kevin Killian for his Orono posts—for creating such an amazing historical document, tribute to community, and stunning enactment of narrative excess. I invite any of you who have followed his report to join me in a hearty round of applause.

Dialoguing with the Dead

While doing the dishes this morning I was thinking of Louise Kaplan's book No Voice Is Ever Wholly Lost, in which she examines ways in which we continue to dialogue with loved ones after they die. You find yourself doing things a parent would have liked you to do before they died, you see the deceased strolling down the street and do a double-take before you realize it's merely a stranger with familiar attributes. Kaplan:

Grief becomes your companion, your child, your sustenance, your soul. But this romance with grief must be a secret. Mourning is something you are supposed to do and get over, you are told. You must put on the mask of still living. No one must ever know about your dialogue with the dead.

For me, doing the dishes—any kind of domesticity—is a dialogue with my mother, who died last year on November 1. The one year anniversary is coming up, so that dialogue has been intense. Little things, like her favorite color was blue, and I find myself wearing blue clothes, a color I've avoided most of my life. When I was younger I did everything I could to not be her. Thus blue clothes were out, thus house cleaning was out. Luckily that all dropped away in the end, and she and I had a wonderful romance the last few years of her life. A couple of weeks ago I dreamt I was visiting her at her house, and then I remembered that my brother had cleaned out the house and it's now empty—I haven't seen the empty house, so it's this horrible fantasy image for me. In the dream, my mother said I was wrong, that everything was exactly the same. It was heart-breaking.

The only things of my mother's I shipped from Indiana to California were photos and other ephemeral, a tray that came with a liquour set she received as a wedding present, and her clown collection. Her clown collection is currently on display at Right Window Gallery at ATA (992 Valencia Street, San Francisco), as part of "There's Nothing Funny About A Clown In The Moonlight," a great show curated by Matt Post in conjunction with Kevin Killian. (It will be up through November 2.) Here's some images I took at the opening last Sunday:

My attempt at a long-shot in the tiny gallery space.


My mom's clown figurines.

I found this in my mom's cedar chest. Written on it in marker is, "Winnie's Crying Towel—1981." My mom's name is Winnie. I have no idea where this came from, and who would give something like this to her.

Stephen Boyer, Kevin, and Cliff Hengst in eerie flash-free lighting, with balloons that were later used in Raphael Noz's window performance.


The clown painting that hung above my mother's bed, now in the window of ATA.

All these objects, which I scoffed at as tacky when they were situated in my mom's house now of course are precious, numinous—and I'm reminded that I never wrote about the afternoon Kevin and I ducked out of the Positions Colloquium in Vancouver and drove out to the special collections at Simon Fraser to go through the material recently acquired from Robin Blaser.

Kevin embracing the bounty.

Among the Blaser papers was a box of the detective and science fiction books found in Jack Spicer's room when he died.

One of my favorites in the collection.

My job as research assistant was to compile a list of all 82 books, including their publication dates:


In the process I discovered that a handful of the books were published after Spicer's death in August, 1965, so the collection isn't pure/totally reliable. (If anybody would like a copy of the list, email me and I'd be happy to send it to you.) But it was magical touching Spicer's books, some of which I recognized, having read the same editions as a child when I was a sci-fi buff. I was touching Spicer's and my own past simultaneously. A sense of honoring, of taking care. It was a chore and it was tedious as hell and took forever, but I loved doing it. Those special collections folks, I thought, they're like shamans or priests, holding these remains and all the energies that cling to them, nurturing a space for continued dialogue.

Kevin Killian: What I Saw at the Orono Conference 2008, part 24

Sunday, June 15, 2008

I’m sure I don’t know what I would do if they scheduled my panel on the first or second shift on Sunday morning! I thought that there’d be no one on campus when I tiptoed in, but rooms were filling up nicely. People who went to these panels aren’t die-hards, exactly, but maybe they believe in getting full weight out of any activity they participate in—at any rate they seemed more virtuous than other groups I’d seen. The dissolute among us stayed back in the dorm, nursing hangovers. One graduate student came in groaning because, calling home, he had discovered that his toddler had cavities, involving a $1200 outlay—ouch. It was almost as if the real world of the 21st century was making forays into our little 70s island, and it wasn’t going to be pretty.

I figured I could make it to the 9 a.m. panels, if not to the 10:30 ones. What a shame because I particularly wanted to hear Brett Millier give a paper on Jean Garrigue’s last poems. I’m glad someone is doing some work on Garrigue who has always haunted me, like the specter of “Stella by Starlight” floating through the rented seaside house in The Uninvited (1944). But did I think she was a 70s poet? By now I was confused, thoroughly, as to what that meant, or rather, what people thought it means. Millier has spent so many years working on Elizabeth Bishop—is Garrigue a lateral move, or a breakout? Too bad I had to miss it. Instead I wound up at a panel about Whalen, Hickman, and Patchen! I think it was called, “Whalen, Hickman, Patchen.” Lots of guys in that room in Barrows Hall. For about two minutes Miriam Nichols came in, looked askance, then gathered her papers and schedule, and took off. That left a solid body of nothing but guys to be in the audience, and as all the speakers were male and the chair too, I drifted back off to the old days of Brideshead Revisited, or perhaps me back in boys’ school in the 1960s, and thought, maybe the women went home early, or like Dodie were taking the morning off to pack, or maybe they were all at some rival panel—but which?

Jasper Bernes

Bruce Holsapple gave an affectionate and yet distanced look at Philip Whalen’s production of the 1970s, the age in which he had his greatest production, and yet his greatest slowdown—eventually he stopped writing altogether, for a variety of spiritual, emotional and surely physical reasons? I panicked as I had listening to Ann Lauterbach speak of Brainard’s retirement. Whalen’s eyesight troubled him for the last decades of his life; I was never actually sure whether he recognized me each time we met, and after awhile adopted the sort of jaunty voice I imagine blind people will enjoy pegging. But was he blind? He was enormously fat, or so it seemed to me then, but I wonder if now that I’ve gained so much weight, will I stop writing too? Will it be difficult for me to dip my pen into that pot of black ink and produce my acclaimed calligraphic-based poetry from my monastery study with the cactused blooming all around me? I enjoyed Mark Silverberg’s admiring take on Kenneth Patchen’s last years, though no golden oratory is going to persuade me that Patchen’s posters and poems were all that. But wait a second, then we got to Leland Hickman, and Stephen Motika revealed that, at a certain point, Hickman’s own artistic production shrank down to nothing, and that his last years were bereft of poems—his own that is—during the Temblor years and his valiant struggle against AIDS.

Two months later Dodie and I went to Vancouver and I was surprised to see how many attendees and speakers at the KSW “Positions Colloquium” had simply ‘moved on’ from poetry, as though it were a stage of development, and now they were happier without it and also, better citizens. Our New York-based friend Sharon Mesmer suggests that, for better or worse, the present age is “post-poetry.”

Being there with Joel Bettridge

On that note it was time to go home. To stock up for our long trip back we stopped at Orono’s Mill Street to a little sandwich shop called Harvest Moon Deli. It was pretty hip inside, and you could order off the menu sandwich creations with the names of rock and pop stars—cute. Joel Bettridge, Peter O’Leary, Michael Scharf, Joshua Clover, Franklin Bruno were all lined up ahead of us. It turned out that Joel had been born in Alaska and never saw any TV till he was, what, 20 years old or something so, he confessed, he had vast gaps in his pop culture. He did not seem to be able to recall ever hearing, for example, of Barbara Steele—or William Castle, the horror producer of the late 1950s and early 60s. To me, his innocence (or ignorance) carried a pleasant charge of spirituality, like the way Chauncey Gardiner’s blank slate dreaminess gets eroticized by those he encounters, in Kosinsky’s Being There.

Tim Kreiner

On the highway we tried another rest stop and ran into Patrick Pritchett, Linda Russo, Jasper Bernes, Tim Kreiner. It was like Joshua Clover had said, you can’t pull away, the sticky bits will keep you in the temporary zone till they’re ready to release you. It did feel like everywhere we went we were to keep seeing our friends, a comforting feeling really, for we didn’t want to get kicked out of paradise.

Steve and Jennifer were, we knew, having a buffet or something for those stuck in Orono an additional night. Tom and Rae and Miriam were all going and we looked at each other and said, “Wish we were at that dinner!” What wimps we are at heart and how we long for our artificial paradise. Instead we were grimly approaching Portland, Maine, where we were told that “weather” would prevent our plane from leaving till the morning. Naturally we’d miss our New York connection. Just one of those things, and because it was “weather” the airline wasn’t even going to provide us with a pillow apiece to sleep on the floor of the airport. All around us businessmen and retirees were screaming bloody murder at the airline personnel and I couldn’t blame them, not exactly, but oh, what a hazardous duty these poor people have who man those stations! Though I will say that the girl who waited on us was smug and cold, the smile on her face as she told us of the horrors of the next few days was appalling. We were trying to keep our dignity in the face of a disaster. We were humanists—we wouldn’t subject the hired help to abuse. So we nodded grimly, our knuckles white on the service counter. It was a crazy 24 hours we spent after that but somehow, in NYC, we got onto a plane with our young musician friend Tomo, from Coconut, and we all managed to sleep together miles above the surface of the spinning earth.

Thank you, Steve and Jennifer, for making it all happen for us and for being such ‘great companions.’ These notes I dedicate to you two.

Kevin Killian: What I Saw at the Orono Conference 2008, part 23

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Because of the delay at the Colby College Museum, everything was hours behind, and we had only about 4 minutes to get over to Minsky Hall and start listening to more festive keynote speakers. For that reason “Four Minutes to Save the World,” Madonna’s recent comeback single, kept running through my head, Madonna + Justin + Timbaland, and it wasn’t happening for me . . . I don’t know, what did you do this summer? Jennifer stopped and calculated that the last thing any of of us had had to eat was at the lobster banquet which must have been a good 24 hours ago, so she and Dodie disappeared for a bit in search of some take out food. Now that I see the photos of the people living the high life in the Doris Twitchell Allen hall or wherever they were making those giant smorgasbords, I can barely credit my eyes. Oh well, I’m not too good at cooking anyhow I doubt I could have achieved anything like the beef Wellington and shrimp cocktail spreads those photos betray were happening all around us.

The first plenary reading was by Tom Raworth, who first read a few brief poems from a new booklet called Let Baby Fall—brief poems, published by Critical Documents. The cover shows an image by Raphael, one of those pictures where the Renaissance artist shows Mary displaying for the world to see the male genitals of her baby, and here he is seeming to slip out of her grasp entirely. Leo Steinberg wrote that famous article in October 25 years ago about “The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion,” in which he offered an explanation for a crude fact about Renaissance painting that had baffled so many for centuries, why it is that, in painting after painting, the genitals of Christ on the cross, as well as baby Christ in the manger, are often bizarrely showcased and foregrounded—so much so that later generations would sometimes paint a discreet cache-sexe over the offending items. Tom read these with the abandon of a boy skipping stones at the beach, but then he got serious by offering to read his massive 70s piece Writing.

At the end of Writing, I ran up to him with my camera to capture this remarkable moment. Tom’s face was bright red like the skin of a pumpkin, and his eyes were shining with a great glee. Sweat soaked his mustache, that little mustache we have all come to love.

Tom Raworth in the moment of triumph

He was huffing and panting like a teen with a fistful of glue, and the stimulation was palpable. We congratulated him on his great performance and he announced that he was 70 now, that was the last time he’d ever read the piece, the breakneck pace was for younger men. It was a little startling because, of course, one has always thought of him as a contemporary rather younger than oneself. Afterwards I asked him if this was true or was it just in the heat of the moment, the way I might announce, after a long day at work, that I quit and wasn’t going to come back on Tuesday. Or the way Cher keeps retiring and retiring and retiring. I certainly hope that, if Tom is retiring, he does it Cher-style, with a huge battleship set and fetching chorus boys dressed as cadets.


There was much sneaking in and out of an abandoned dressing room in the Class of 44 Building, a dressing room that I imagined had seen many college drama school crises and triumphs—a dressing room very like the one Calvero has at the beginning of Chaplin’s Limelight, with telegrams stuck in the corners of the great mirror and those big round bulbs illuminating everything, particularly the ageless weariness of the aging star. Here was a big pizza pie smuggled in between events, and Steve and I hurried in for a bite to relieve Jennifer and Dodie who went out to hear some poetry. Back and forth, switching on and off in sensible maneuvers—like the relief of Mafeking. Mmmmm, people say the pizza in Maine isn’t very good but I am here to tell you that it’s true what Granddad used to say, hunger is the best tomato sauce. And of course scarfing it down in front of a highly lit makeup mirror just makes it seem all the more tasty not to mention theatrical. We would stop yakking whenever we heard anybody’s footsteps come by—ssssshhh! Out in the hallway Steve Motika introduced me to Lytton Smith, who must still remember me as the man whose face was completely covered in pizza remnants—hurriedly swallowed pizza.

Lytton Smith in the hallway

Lytton Smith had already started blogging about the Orono conference, and I looked at him as I looked at Peter O’Leary (who was also blogging about these events for the Poetry Foundation website in Chicago)—in awe at their command of the situation. As I thought back on everything I wanted to tell you, I knew I would be in for the long haul. Smith has written a boom which sounds very compelling, The All-Purpose Magical Tent. I think I was embarrassed and so wasn’t paying enough attention to this name, which I mis-heard several ways, chiefly as The Magical Porpoise Tank which I knew was wrong but you know how the wrong thing stays in your head far longer than the right.

I was saved from further abasement by the arrival of Rae Armantrout, the last of our principal speakers, who swept through the hall in a beautiful outfit just in time to win my fashion award. I hadn’t seen her in some months, and I can only assume that the plenary became her, a whole category of beauty. Her hair was streaked with golden glowing tendrils like a Rossetti painting, and her earrings flew back as she advanced towards us. “Come on Rae,” I said, camera at my eye, like David Hemmings in Blow Up instructing Veruschka and Jane Birkin how to roll around on colored paper, “don’t even pause, keep rushing this way.” click, click, click.

Running to the podium, Ms. Rae Armantrout

Behind her the elevator door rolled shut, quietly. In a minute she was onstage and telling us that Veil (her 2001 collection of new and selected poems) has two poems from the 1970s in it and she was going to read them both. Briskly she moved right through Veil, The Pretext, Up to Speed, Next Life, and Versed and then came out with some final flourishes unlike anything else she has ever written. In her shimmering white blouse she looked for all the world like William Blake’s famous watercolor of The Angel of Revelation from 1805, as perhaps she had been in another life.


And that night, because it was our last night, and I was full, the cash bar remained open late late late, and that night we were not divided.

Kevin Killian: What I Saw at the Orono Conference 2008, part 22

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Eileen Myles had her own theories of the 1970s that she delivered in a rapidfire pace, without notes, and she flavored her theories with memories of her own New York City life during that time. She sketched a 1970s New York of many facets, the one that sticks in my mind is the world she encountered of important older gay men halfway in the closet and resentful if you pulled them out: the only out ones, she said, were the crazy ones who couldn’t help but be out, guys like James Schuyler.

Dodie delivered a talk she had written on the Feminist Writers Guild, her own memoir of belonging to this largely artisanal, dopey and yet at bottom ultimately inspiring group of women writers and artists banding together with vague notions of Bloomsbury floating in their heads. The Marin library of one member was grandly dubbed, “The Virginia Woolf Reading Room.” Dodie's talk has a wonderful epigraph from Acker's My Mother: Demonology: “I don’t know whether we were feminists. We did establish political positions in our class by picking best friends.”


My paper wound up the panel, half cribbed from Andrea Brady’s Paideuma articles summarizing her chase after Wieners in the libraries of several dozen UK and US speciual collections department, and half from Wayne Koestenbaum’s article “The Rape of Rusty,” which traces his own boyhood fascination with the cruel figure of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge. Around the meat of these essays I tried to place the sandwich bread of John Wieners’ “Three Carols for Myra Breckinridge" written in March, 1974. Here's one, called "The Future." By the by I appeal to other Wieners scholars U R G E N T!!!, have these poems ever been collected anywhere, or do they just exist in the original Mitzel/Steven Abbott book that commissioned them, "Myra & Gore"?

The Future

without death, resurrection only regeneration
leaves no question literary remains prose nation.

If you only take care of yourself, your country will take care
of you, dearest selection of all races, any stipulation.

Doorknobs remain brass, despite golden valuation
outside the city, or within its private stations.

over vast condotteries: they go any which
way the wind blows. Trying to guide us as bitch

49 years less coffin limitation de vie, medication,
outside prescription’s law, an omission

I made, many times myself, as youth run-
ning narcotics, under the impression a goof turn

for my friends would yield credence, an experience
necessary, in their faces belying anything else

except drugs’ betrayal. smacking dead lips this
Evening, beside the bennies, the cotton’s, the hypo’s kiss.

And also, can anyone tell me what or who is in charge of the John Wieners estate? I want permission to print these poems—and other unpublished material—but who do I go to? Please, please, please respond!

The reception to the queer panel was everything we hoped it would be! I was so exhilarated and relieved. I got to meet one of my favorite Oppen scholars, Eric Hoffman, he's the man who looked through Oppen's FBI files and pieced together more of the mysterious Mexican interlude than anybody else—and found himself in hot water from other Oppen critics I gather, it's only human nature to want to deny that your man was an active Stalinist. My own talk I gave on George Oppen many years back annoyed some Oppenologists for a very different reason, and as I told Eric two of the big ones haven't spoken to me since the day after I delivered it.

Blurry photo of Eric Hoffman, Jennifer Moxley descending the staircase behind him

A week or so later Patrick Pritchett sent me a postcard from Cambridge, of Wieners at Walden Pond in 1973, with Lee Harwood, Lewis Warsh, both looking wraithlike, with Victoria Beckham’s haircut, and William Corbett, dapper in sneakers. I can’t really think of explaining what Wieners is wearing in this shot, but I can see why Pat thought of it when listening to my talk. I guess it’s like a wool football jacket in a way, except accessorized with pockets, collar and long chevrons of a violently weird fabric, perhaps silver satin, perhaps crushed velvet, but what it really looks like is the helium-filled mylar pillows of Warhol’s famous 1966 show at Leo Castelli. Thanks, Patrick!

Warhol's "Silver Clouds"

Kevin Killian: What I Saw at the Orono Conference 2008, part 21

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Dodie and I were thunderstruck arriving at the panel on “New Narrative and the New Sentence” and to find so many people there in the audience. Especially because the New Narrative panel was running opposite so many others that I would have guessed to be much more popular.

I sat in the back of the classroom and jotted down the names of those I recognized. But you didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see that this panel was a subject of some interest among the Grand Piano crowd. Barrett sat right in the middle of the row—very far up—super close to the panelists, almost where a teachers pet would sit, and then in the long row directly behind his I could see Steve Benson, Rae Armantrout, Kit Robinson and Bob Perelman, like his wingmen. It was a striking visual picture and later the panelists each confessed to a moment of dizzying fear when they saw “Barrett and the Jets” in this particular grouping. Rembrandt should have painted them, my words are inadequate. But beyond the Language poets, if I may still call them that, the room was pleasantly filled with brains. Carla Billitieri was the chair of the panel, facing Lytton Smith and Stephen Motika, Eileen Myles, Ben Friedlander, Rodney Koeneke and Stan Apps, Jeanne Heuving, Chris Glomski, Steven Zultanski, Tina Darragh (perhaps should be grouped with original Language poets? but didn't line up with the wingmen), Patrick Durgin, Tim Kreiner, and others whom my notes tentatively identify as “green beard guy” (now, that’s got to be wrong!), “woman with red hair,” and “bear looking tall guy with beard.” All in all a distinguished crowd. If green beard guy, woman with red hair, or bear looking tall guy with beard happen to be reading this could you step forward and identify yourself for purposes of rejection of closure?

Robin Tremblay McGaw

The New Narrative of the 70s I missed basically, because I didn’t arrive in San Francisco until 1980, but the panelists made a strong case that some decisive turns in its development had already occurred by the time I signed up. Dodie and I nodded approvingly through Robin Tremblay-McGaw’s thorough and assured account of the intersections between New Narrative, what we then called Language Poetry, and other social and political movements of the period. Kaplan Harris went all forensics on us as he attempted to track down and interweave scattered accounts of a long ago Marxist study group that included almost a comical variety of principal players of each movement—a group which apparently fell apart within six months, but out of which came great things, as well as great schisms.

Kaplan Harris urged into the well-known "Chloe Sevigny" pose by the photographer. In this pose you, like Miss Sevigny, drop your head down so that you are staring at the photographer's feet, then slowly—slowly!—you lift only your eyeballs, leaving the rest of your head in its original downward-facing shoe gaze. Miss Sevigny is said to allow only photographs of herself to be published if she checks first to see that she has adopted her trademark pose. It's seductive, all that white of the eye showing, and the upturned brow it entails.

By this time most everyone in the room must have been convinced, or nearly so, of the panel’s principal argument—namely, that Language Poetry as we know it was severely (perhaps "helpfully" is a better adverb) detourned, rearranged, and basically had its ass handed to it by the gadfly gay voices of the original New Narrative movement, Bob Gluck, Bruce Boone, and the late Steve Abbott. It came Rob Halpern’s turn to speak and he produced a smoking gun (and distributed what must have been the largest and loveliest handout of the entire conference). This was a blow up of a few pages from Soup magazine, the “house organ” of New Narrative of that date, and yet a journal that published quite a few key Language poetry documents as well during its brief four-issue run (in the 1980s, so I was there for that).

Mainly the spread showed Bruce Boone’s article, “Language Writing: The Pluses and Minuses of the New Formalism,” perhaps not one of Boone’s best articles, but that’s like saying, oh, that Lake Mead isn’t one of God’s best lakes. The salient thing was that, as a kind of sidebar to Boone’s article, Bob Perelman’s poem “China” first saw the light of day. Halpern then was able to demonstrate that it was thanks to “China’s” appearance in Soup, and Boone’s frenemy-ship with Fredric Jameson, that the controversial poem first found its way into Jameson’s heart, resulting in a memorable description of Perelman, and by extension Language writing in general, as schizophrenic.

Next was our panel, the one I’d been looking forward to, and dreading, for weeks. Originally I had made a bid to speak, as I had at three previous conferences, on Jack Spicer. Oh, why not? Even though Spicer died in 1965, I thought that I could concentrate on Blaser’s edition of Spicer’s Collected Books (1975), for which there’s loads of new information now that Blaser has made his working papers available at the Bancroft Library here in Berkeley. I was tracing back issues connected to the reception of the book (issues I now realize probably had much to do with my own anxiety about the imminent release of the new edition of Spicer's writing that Peter Gizzi and I have prepared and which will appear in December.) But then Eileen Myles called, saying she had landed Liz Kotz and Dodie, and she wanted me too to sit on a “queer panel.” Somehow the dry, textual sort of paper I had planned didn’t seem right, so I "went with" (as it were) John Wieners, and in a larger sense I would try to deal with the larger issues of cross-dressing and sexual difference I saw as emblematic of the 1970s (perhaps my own 70s).

Kevin Killian: What I Saw at the Orono Conference 2008, part 20

Saturday, June 14, 2008

My friend Andrew Epstein writes in to remind me that not all of us who got to see the huge Colby College Museum show of Alex Katz' paintings were as dismayed as I was. Andrew is one of my favorite guys and the author of the recent, acclaimed, and controversial study of the friendships between three "New American" poets (John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara and Le Roi Jones) called Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (Oxford University Press) which came out just about this time of year in 2006 and which since has been much studied and admired. Besides, look at that face, he is as honest as the day is long and three times as discriminating:


It isn't that I dislike Alex Katz, it was just the whole wing concept that got to me, and as the paintings got bigger and bigger I began to feel oppressed, light in the head, like that famous scene in Goldfinger where all the mobsters are gathered together in one room and the walls lock in and Pussy Galore and Goldfinger siphon in the canisters of poison gas—tricked again! (Or am I just free associating between "Katz" and "Pussy," well it wouldn't be the first time.) Andrew Epstein urges me to take another look at the portraits of poets on display at Colby, which he finds "inspiring, as well as historic." I forgot to mention that Andrew is a talented poet too. And that he teaches at Florida State University so I think I've never actually met him anywhere else but at Orono, so for me it is one of those "Same Time Next Year" relationships that the compartmentalization of modern affective life posits. So here are some of the pictures Andrew shot "in situ" as it were with his shiny cell phone and sent to me in reproof:

Rudy Burckhardt by Alex Katz

Vincent Katz (with Frisbee) by Alex Katz

Allen Ginsberg

Ted Berrigan (very iconic!) by Alex Katz

OK, OK, I'm won over, Andrew! I don't know if those gray walls are doing the pictures any favors though. Oh maybe they are. At any rate Andrew, I appreciate your intervention and since, above all things I despise a hater, I consider myself reproved and re-set in my ways. Indeed I should forward these pictures to Calvin Tompkins who in this week's New Yorker has published a lengthy and glowing profile of mid-career painter Elizabeth Peyton, crediting her with re-inventing the art of the portrait, for whatever it is that Peyton is doing, Alex Katz was doing it thirty and forty years back. Am I right, people? And thanks also, Andrew Epstein, for hearing my plea and sending a cell phone image of Bernadette Mayer's actual reading when she called Clark Coolidge up onto the front of the room so the two of them could read from one of their 70s collaborations:

Look at that college seal affixed to the podium—keep staring into its single eye—soon you will feel the hypnosis of reality . . . It starts whirling back and forth after an hour or two . . . Next up, I return to my chronological order and tell what happened when Dodie and I went to a panel holding up "New Narrative" as a counter to the New Sentence.

Kevin Killian: What I Saw at the Orono Conference 2008, part 19

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Kevin between two Bridget Riley prints from the 1970s Photo by Kimberly Lyons

And yes, it was hot. The bus let us off at a weird corner of campus--it was, in fact, where most of the conference attendees were being housed, the dorms of Doris Twitchell Allen Village, where registration was too. My mind went blank and I couldn’t think of where to go nor which way the next conference events were—I felt disoriented, like Ronald Reagan waking up from his operation in Kings Row, and not feeling his legs, and crying out, “Where’s the rest of me?!” only I was crying out, “Where is Neville Hall?” Anyhow it was blazing hot out—Death Valley hot, Stephen—and stricken with thirst, I dipped my head into the Doris Twitchell Allen Village in search of a water fountain and once again found myself face to face with the august portrait of La Allen. I loved the idea of a whole village being named for this archetypal Maine celebrity, the Anna Freud of Maine, Anna Freud except tremendously mannish, sort of like FDR in this heroic bas-relief portrait of her. She spanned whole eras of the 20th century, and in fact she lived until she was 100, so when Hillary Clinton said, “It takes a village,” one suspected it was Doris Twitchell Allen Village she had in mind. Touching to think of Twitchell Allen spreading her “talking cure” across whole generations not only of U-Maine students but the visiting poets and scholars over whose sleeping forms she prevailed nightly and daily.

Age one hundred! Last summer I was at Art Basel and one of the art students of Frankfort’s Stadelschule described making a video projection about Basel’s #1 citizen, Albert Hoffman, who would appear on his birthday every year from his balcony above Basel’s High Street, waving to his beloved Baselians. Well, who was Albert Hoffman, I asked the student, the Canadian artist David Catherall. He looked at me as if I was out of my mind. “He invented LSD,” he replied witheringly, and with reason. Like the way heroin seemed to keep Burroughs or Keith Richards exactly the same, arresting the normal aging process entirely, LSD kept Albert Hoffman young and vigorous until his sudden death this past April at the age of 102, just as psychodrama, which Twitchell Allen invented, preserved her youthful energy for decades. Check her out on Wikipedia, which has a tremendously femme photograph, in dewy Greer Garson soft focus, of the woman I know only from her visage mounted in her Village. Thirstily I drank deep from her fountains then went on my way, refreshed, to find Neville Hall and to look up the panel organized around Clark Coolidge’s poetry. But despite it being hours late, they were not ready to roll yet.

The lobby was deserted, and so dim after the harsh lights of the afternoon sun I was blinking like an earwig. A sudden shift of movement from one far off corner caught my eye—it was the napping form of Chris Nealon, preparing for his panel by taking forty winks, sensibly and enviably.

Finally I took a chance on getting into the museum to see the show of Art of the 1970s, and a small crowd was milling within. I think I was the only guy there, but we all sat or stood around in the room in which Bernadette Mayer’s installation was playing of “Memory.” If I understand correctly, she shot a roll of film every day for a month, then had a month’s worth of slides of daily life projected onto a screen while she recorded eight hours’ worth of memories of that one month. The materials for this work of art are stored with her papers at the archive for new poetry at UCSD, and this reconstruction used about a week of the material, thus only two hours worth of talking.

You can’t miss Ed Bowes, who must have been Bernadette’s boyfriend at the time; he took a lot of the photographs and turns up in the frame himself again and again, vertically, horizontally, diagonally. The following month I met the man himself, thirty odd years later, and he still looks pretty good. He is now married to Anne Waldman, small world department! The eerie thing about Memory is that Ed and Bernadette must have been living very close to the building of the World Trade Center, for the towers are rising in these slides, while Bernadette’s voice, itself very different than the way she sounds now, narrates an “I do this, I do that” list of different things she did and said that month, but you can read all about it in her book Memory, one of the key 20th century texts.

I took a picture of Kim Lyons next to Jasper Johns’ gleeful print, a stack of triangles built out of what look like Pixy Stix, for her blouse looked just like it, its angles and colors rhyming in a slant. This Johns image was the official image of the conference and we all saw it 30 times a day because it was on the cover of the conference program and many, during tedious or lengthy presentations, were reduced to staring at it for comfort as it lay open on their desks or clutched to their yellow legal pads. I was wearing an Apache shirt from Agnes B,. gray and black stripes pulled tight across my stomach, and the wavy lines of a pair of Bridget Riley “Op Art” prints nearby was a good focus for my shirt. I’ve got the print right now, of the snap Kim took of me, my shirt, those Bridget Riley squares. I look fat and happy, like “some pig.” As we exit the gallery, Kim whispers, well, we’ve found a good use for conceptual art—it makes nice backdrops for souvenirs. I wonder if they still make Pixy Stix or if anyone remembers them—they must feature, in fact, in one or another edition of Joe Brainard’s “I Remember.”

Kevin Killian: What I Saw at the Orono Conference 2008, part 18

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Then Clark Coolidge read, introduced by Tom Orange, and afterwards, the program told us, at 1:10 sharp Ann Lauterbach was to give a gallery talk on the work of Joe Brainard. Well, it was late in the day by the time Clark Coolidge finished reading, and yet we wouldn’t have had it any other way. The Coolidges continued their fashion triumph, and I took a secret photo and sent it off to my bud, the Toronto bookseller, novelist, and fashion expert Derek McCormack, asking for his help in writing about their outfits. “I'm having a devil of a time describing these clothes,” Derek fired back. “I so want to find the perfect precise word to describe the white jacket that Clark Coolidge is wearing—it’s such a common shape, but what is it called? It looks to me like windbreaker, though that's such a vague term. It’s a drawstring windbreaker. It could also be considered a drawstring anorak. Couldn't it?” I agree, Derek. “It seems sailor-ish, though—like a sailing coat or sailing jacket.” In my view it was Clark’s salute to Maine and its proximity to the Atlantic whaling trade. “I wonder if it was first made way back when for military boys. It looks a little like a snow smock.”

Fashion analyst Derek McCormack has written a new novel, The Show That Smells

What about Susan, I asked.

“Did Susan Coolidge belt her shirt? I like her sandals—sort of gladiatory, which was all the rage this summer. I sound like summer's over, which it sort of is, I suppose, in the fashion world. I did an article on gladiator sandals for the Post. I liked the low gladiator sandals. Alaia did amazing ankle-high sandals. Alaia is a master—I get goosebumpy when I get to see his stuff in stores.” Well, the mystery lingers on but as you can see I had plenty to chew on during the brilliant 45 minute reading Clark gave of some largely unpublished work.

Ann Lauterbach in front of Alex Katz' portrait of her from the 70s at Colby College event

We got up, stretched, then dashed off to a small room was filled with some of Joe Brainard’s Nancy pictures, in a grouping they called “If Nancy was...”—such as “If Nancy was a Willem De Kooning.”) I used to love Nancy, in fact every day for a year when I was 7 I cut out each strip as it appeared in the daily Long Island Press, which dates me I guess: I expect for many of the young people Nancy will be no more a legible signifier than Kilroy poking his nose over a fence, or those strange moon symbols carved into outhouse doors in 30s documentaries—that people will just look at her and shrug or, if they’re high, just sigh, “Wow.” Lauterbach managed to make these random thoughts irrelevant as she spoke to her own acquaintance with Brainard, and with his real-life boyfriend the poet Kenward Elmslie, and she rode purposefully to the heart of the mystery, Brainard decision to give up art and just to sit by the side of the lake in Vermont and let others have careers, make things. It is always a painful subject to ponder, I think especially for we artists, for though his actions seem inexplicable—well, he had AIDS but as we know thousands of artists with AIDS continued to burn that candle all all ends, brilliantly, into the long night—I suppose some imp might get into any of us, at any moment, and we too would never write again. Could come on me tomorrow. I might not even make it to the end of my Orono account.

I should have asked Lee Ann Brown when I had her!

Maybe the artists of the 70s were especially attuned to this phenomenon of “full stop.” I remember for years that Clark Coolidge wasn’t giving readings; people said he had forsworn them entirely, something about him not being able to hear the beat. Then one day he began again; and one day Bob Kaufman started talking; and Oppen began to write again, and so forth, but for Joe, not so much. What about that Tender Buttons logo? Lee Ann was right there, sitting on the gallery floor and playing with her remarkable daughter Miranda—I should have asked one of them, for I had always believed that Joe broke his vow and made that one last little pansy as a gift to Lee Ann, but maybe it was just some old number from the back shelf of his prolific past.

Behind me on the bus, once again, Justin Katko

On the bus I sat in front of Justin Katko who was finishing up a creative piece for the open reading that would crown the evening’s events, and behind Rebecca Weaver, and I think this is where I really started to feel panic about my paper, which was coming up quickly—oh my God, it was going to be that very evening and I still hadn’t really proved any of my points. My paper was going to be about John Wieners and his turn to wearing women’s clothes at a certain point in the 1970s. Somehow I planned to discuss his “Three Carols for Myra Breckinridge” in the context of the “turn to drag,” as I called it imitation of the oft-repeated “turn to language.” But what did the one have to do with the other? A close reading of the three poems might help—three poems that I figured, my audience would not know, since apparently they had never been reprinted since 1978. Were figure and ground too discontinuous in my talk? How does transvestism connect with transsexuality—which is where I wanted my paper to go? If I spoke fast enough—or perhaps slowed things down to a dead crawl, the way Kathy Acker used to do when she feared she was losing her audience—if I spoke a certain way could I befuddle the audience into believing that my argument was sound? Behind me Justin Katko was apparently writing something too, out loud, ditto Becky Weaver , though she was silent. Others on the bus seemed suave and carefree, it was just our little section sweating. My brain was pumping out these little gasps of “Oh my God!” like I was Woody Allen meeting Mariel Hemingway for the first time. And yes, it was hot.

And yes, it was hot.

Kevin Killian: What I Saw at the Orono Conference 2008, part 17

Saturday, June 14, 2008

I couldn’t believe it but I was up super early in order to partake of the special bus trip laid on by the organizers. I guess I could have driven but, since it was 9 a.m., Dodie wasn’t going to get up early enough to join me, and I thought it would be fun taking the bus to Colby College, where its spectacular gallery was having a huge show of, what else, art of the 1970s. Events had conspired all around me over the previous few weeks to force the name of Colby College down my throat, where prior to that I swear I had never, ever heard of it before—you know how things go, you’re happily oblivious to, say, barley anthracnose, when all of a sudden it’s coming to you from all sides: on TV they’re reporting that Dick Cheney’s barley crops this year have been decimated by BA, on line at the grocery store you see, on the cover of the Enquirer, that Rosie O’Donnell has raised $100 million to combat it, and then your mom calls and says that lonely aunt Reva has come down with barley anthracnose shingles, poor thing and before long you’re googling it and checking your own pulse and vital signs to compare how you’re doing when stacked up to the neat squares of grain in your turkey-barley casserole, and thus you don’t feel so good. Well I won’t go into the details, but suffice it to say that every nerve in my body was tingling in anticipation of spending a Saturday at Colby College about which I had recently heard so much. This information had come flooding to me--or was it that it had always been flooding past me, and I had not until now been a proper receptor? That’s up for debate.

There were two buses and one was for—now I can’t remember why there were two, but the one I got into was filled with friends. I looked around, not wanting to sit all by myself alone, but everyone looked so busy. Jimmy Sharkey sat at the back of the bus tapping each of us on the shoulder, one by one, and we would walk back to his video camera, perched near the rear restroom, and answer his questions about what’s so wonderful about this conference and how did you get into poetry in the first place? Can’t wait to see the completed video montage of all of our answers! The ride took about an hour and a half, beautiful highways travelling south from Orono to Waterville. Waterville, they told me, is the Deauville of Maine, a total movie capital. It might not look like much on the surface but stick around and you will notice there are over one dozen intimate repertory and foreign movie theaters. Indeed when I came back from Maine I had lunch with Matt Wolf, the young New York based director of Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, now making the festival circuit, and I asked him, “Where to next, Matt?” He poked at his chow mein and mumbled that I wouldn’t have heard of it, but it was a hotbed of underground, experimental, and Sundance type film and it was in Waterville, Maine! In fact it was the Maine International Film Festival (July 11--20, 2008, the longest film festival in the United States), and oh, how I wish I had stuck around because they gave this year’s MIFF award to one about whom I have two minds, John Turturro. They say everyone who comes to Waterville feels like a fish out of water, but only for about ten minutes. That “MiFF” thing sounds a little bit too much like the current, vulgar “MILF” acronym as I’m sure the MIFF people have heard about a zillion times since, say, the year American Pie was not featured in classy, solid, adventurous Waterville. The two buses swept up the manicured lawns of Mayflower Hill, as it is known, and before you knew it, there we were at the portals of Colby College Museum.

This was a big old museum for a college! Outside in the courtyard stood a sizable Richard Serra sculpture in three parts, each one a box of “weatherproof steel,” treated with some chemical that made it rust and rot like the underside of a battleship. That evocative rust weave, nearly organic, is perfect for taking pictures and I dragged young Mark Mendoza in front of the cube and made him stand there. If I can find the picture you’ll know why, especially if you watch Gossip Girl and appreciate Chuck Bass’ dark, faux-brutal beauty. It’s the kind of picture Mendoza will like when he’s an old man and can go back and recall when he was young, handsome, adventurous. Inside the museum was simply packed with pictures by Alex Katz. I saw more Alex Katzes in this one day than I’d ever seen before in all the days of my life, and you know something, I’m sort of sorry about it, this was just too much Alex Katz.

Rust never sleeps on Mark Mendoza of Miami, Ohio

It’s like when San Francisco MOMA mounted their big retrospective of Richard Tuttle whose work I used to love, and I can tell you the exact date when that love changed, it was me, trudging through the nth gallery with more mid-period Tuttle works and thinking, like Ikea, you have to get through the whole thing to get out—a Sartrean no exit. He’s still great and I would recommend his work, in patches, to anybody, but here in Colby College I was having what I would nevertheless call a Richard Tuttle crisis and I found myself asking myself what I had ever seen in Alex Katz’ work? Okay, this wouldn’t have gotten out of hand had we not sat down in one giant room where they had trotted out a hundred folding chairs to hear keynote speakers Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer read in front of four enormous Alex Katzes. I mean bigger than barns. Each was dominated by a single color, muted by whitish paint in streaks, mizzled, like Andy Warhol’s piss oxidation paintings of 1978. They looked like forest scenes, perhaps animation cells from the gauzy background artists who made Bambi for Disney’s studios. I kept looking back and forth, trying to measure the three large pieces in my head. The brown and white one, soft, like a big swatch of Bessy the cow’s hide, must be eight feet high and twelve feet across. That looked small next to the green one, ten feet high, twenty across, bigger than any SUV lining the street—green and white, something nautical about it, like weeds flung across the wide sargasso sea—except sylvan.

In turn this was dwarfed by a huge blue and black painting, 12 feet high, 26 feet across. This was longer than my whole apartment, so I whiled away the time trying to picture where my bed was on that painting, where my running shoes, where the TV would be—where our cats were hiding perhaps right now, while Stephen our catsitter was partying among them and trying to download porn on our computer. The blue and black look of this final Alex Katz reminded me in general of the cover of Bernadette’s book Sonnets—but it was the same blue and black that is apparently so modish in book design today, if the books I saw everyone reading at the conference was any barometer.

Jonathan Skinner—
no relation to Cornelia Otis Skinner—nor B.F. Skinner for that matter

Jonathan Skinner rose and delivered a monumental A-to-Z rundown of Bernadette’s life and achievement—probably the funniest and most moving introduction I heard all week. It was long, though, and Bernadette mockingly complained about how he had left her no time to read herself. But she sure did, favoring her bum foot and abjuring the lectern to sit comfortably beneath it—made me glad I was in the front row because what could people in the back rows have seen, maybe the top of her head? Frequently that laugh would ring out across the rows of chairs—possibly the most profane sound ever heard in these college walls—as she came across another poem of hers she liked, from a big stack of them, and she didn’t necessarily read the ones prompting that laugh—no, it was its own separate element on an increasingly complex menu. She wore pigtails, a purple T-shirt. “Poetry and penis size,” she announced. “Does either matter?” She wore a complicated denim vest, black slacks and a turquoise scarf that the green Alex Katz started pixilating before my eyes, like some half remembered 80s acid trip at the old Midnight Sun. I crossed my eyes trying to see, what were those white figures on the turquoise scarf of Bernadette Mayer? Finally I decided they were blobby, South Park-like alphabet characters, like letters in a bowl of alphabet soup that had been sitting there for a few days—Mary Celeste alphabet soup. Sandals protected her dusty feet, she was entirely herself. There was none of that hesitation about declaring herself a poet of the 1970s that would characterize the presentations of Ann Lauterbach, Rae Armantrout. That was who she was, that was her métier.

Can anyone lend me a picture of this reading? I was in the front row and my camera was out of film. The pictures don't have to be of me, they should be of Bernadette sitting in that chair and reading in front of the podium.

Kevin Killian: What I Saw at the Orono Conference 2008, part 16

Friday, June 13, 2008

This battle for the lobster, with its rewarding finish, put us late for the plenary reading at the Class of 1944 Hall, and when we got to our seats and tumbled down we were just hearing the very last of Jennifer Moxley’s introduction of Ann Lauterbach.

Ann Lauterbach, keynote poet

At first she seemed vulnerable and tentative, like a husband coming in late after a big night out and trying not to wake up his sleeping wife. And yet once she launched into her reading proper she was as confident and buoyant as a ship in full sail. She had written, she maintained firmly, only two or three poems in the 1970s, and she was almost convincing in her denials, but then she has always had a dollop of the trickster in her. And when it ended people were stamping their feet and hollering in congratulation.

Nicole Brossard, on the other hand, had spent the 70s writing literally dozens of books tossing them off both in English or French, and as she read she switched back and forth between the two languages as though to say, I don’t even remember which one I’m speaking from moment to moment. Of course we were in a part of Maine into which the French language had soaked right down to the base efficace. Surely generations of Kerouacs and Acadians had listened to this French and gone home, content, muttering to themselves in their sleep of la terre Noire and la patrie, and so forth. Surely everyone loves Nicole Brossard, she is such a treasure and also, so energetic! Plus she is the envy of all of us who thought we could write poems as well as novels, for she can do both and doesn’t even think there’s a difference between them, she is superlative in both categories. And from what it sounds like, her translators are always surprising her by coming up with different full length French manuscripts she had forgotten about years ago and making wonderful English versions of them, so the books spring into life with the increasing pace of skillet popcorn.

Jennifer Moxley, particularly angelic here

Jennifer wrote to me not long ago about the therapeutic value of soaking oneself in a good dose of Nicole Brossard: she is “certainly a tonic for a grumpy spirit. She is always so positive and filled with desire,” making your typical “’anglophone heterosexual’ seem dreary indeed!” I have to agree. At one point in the reading Nicole paused, looked around, and then showed us the French version of a poem that, visually, looked like a crosshatched sampler, the embroidery yet to come. She had translated the piece into English, she told us, and to help her read the poem she was inviting on stage her West Coast opposite number, —none other than Fred Wah! In the rows of sturdy chairs her fans were stamping their feet in delight—it was like having, hmmm, some kind of divine match up like Tammy Wynette summoning George Jones onto the stage of the Grand Ole Opry to join her in a vintage number. We could barely even gasp during this once in a lifetime joint appearance by Canada's two greatest sex symbols.

Dodie Bellamy and Nicole Brossard—
I'm pretty sure that's the Order of Canada pinned to Brossard's blouse!

After this, blinded by the light, like lemmings, we stumbled to the elevator (a big long elevator you could have parked a car in, so it could take maybe 30 of us up at a time), and crashed into the darkness and the bleachers in which history was about to be made. One by one, in singles and in duos and then in combinations, the poets of Washington DC stood and delivered. Maybe I’m wrong but it seemed all the work was vintage, and it was largely from the one magazine Dog City. Someone should publish the complete run all over again; there wasn’t one piece read that didn’t have an authentic thrill to it. And if it’s only two issues, isn’t there that website where you can find all the Language poetry ephemera from Berkeley and New York, 1970s and 80s? It would be the work of an hour and a half I reckon. Anyhow, having stood in the spotlight myself, and feeling all around me the darkness of breathing and responding, I could imagine how these poets were feeling. Tom Orange stood to one side like a coach, Doug Lang hovered nearby like a manager, and in the edges of the light you could see the individual faces in the crowd largely rapt in attention: Mel Nichols, Rod Smith, Chris Nealon, Kaplan Harris, those to whom these readers were familiar faces, but wearing now the invisible badge unaccustomed attention confers. They were all great, and managed also to bestow greatness on others who were absent, by reading their poems as well, an inclusive weave that brought in the living (cf Bernard Welt, Michael Lally, Terence Winch) and the dead (like Tim Dlugos). If there was a spectacular peak to Orono 2008, this was it for me—and yet I realize I’m not explaining myself very well. Maybe it’s on YouTube and you can see what I’m driving at. And oh that Lynne Dreyer! It’s like that famous quote by Kenneth Tynan: “What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.”

History is made at night: DC Poets Mass Reading, Joan Retallack, Lynne Dreyer, Doug Lang, Diane Ward, Phyllis Rosenzweig, Peter Inman, Tina Darragh